This meeting: October 16th 2019 10 pm Pacific time; a day later 10:00 am Pakistan time; 10:30 am India time; 1:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time; 12:00 pm Thailand time; 7:00 am Jordan and 6:00am Turkey.
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We met with Amity 9/19/2019. The action items are below. Email was sent to Amity 10/10/2019, since there were no updates, no response. Another email was sent 10/18/2019
Amity will mail the update with the lat, long included.
Amity will annotate the photo captured of the Amity team in the meeting. Done 10/19/2019, see above
SLAC also needs to know how to access the Firebase data.
Once that is known and the data with lat, long included and we understand the format and how to access it, Les will look at how to incorporate in a backward-compatible fashion into the current PingER.
Bebo will get hold of some Android phones and once he is given instructions on accessing the native app look at experimenting.
Bebo has 4 phones as of 10/16/2019
As of email from Amity 10/19/2019 "Drive link to the app is app" (I think it is called Firebase).
Amity sent a userid and password, I think it is for the Firebase app. But it may be for accessing the Firebase data. If the latter I need some instructions on what URL to use etc. In response to an email Naman clarified it a little "These are the credentials which can be used to access firebase database online. See https://firebase.google.com/"
Bebo sent email to Amity to get an update.
Amity will look to see if they know of any targets in Jammu Kashmir.
Answer appears to be no.
Next meeting will be in a month.
Amity will set up a google poll to determine the date and time
The current time of 20:00 in the US and 08:30 at Amity is appropriate.
Amity will set up and notify the team of the meeting by Zoom. If this is a big problem Les can set up the Zoom meeting.
Amity responded 10/18/2019: We will set up a meeting within the next week.
Bebo has an invitation to be a Keynote Speaker in the 10th International Conference, CONFLUENCE-2020 at Amity on the theme “Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering” to be held on 29th– 31th January, 2020. The topics are big data and the cloud. It would be by Skype. We could fit in the big data aspect. Bebo will put them in contact with Les.
Adib (Updated 7/22/2019)
Adib submitted to "Socio-economic Development Indices and Their Reflection on Internet Performance in ASEAN Countries" to Journal: Engineering Science and Technology, an International Journal. They have requested a re-submission since it is over the limit of 10 pages. Adib re-submitted 7/22/2019.
8/26/2019 status of this submission has changed to Revision Requested.
Bebo
Is wondering about a meeting of PingER collaborators with possible funding from the Internet Archive or possibly others. Also possibly seeking other sources of funding for PingER activities.
It is time to re-raise and discuss the talk for the Internet Archive, and what we might expect from them and how much effort it is to prepare, document and make the data available to the Archive. So far:
Les and Bebo visited the Internet Archive (IA, see https://archive.org/) and initiated a discussion on archiving PingER data (i.e. a mirror for SLAC) at the IA and also giving a talk on PingER at the IA.
The IA responded with information on using an IA Python library to archive the data at the IA. Les responded with interest but lack of resources until mid-September at the earliest. Also maybe after giving a talk at IA there might be interest in collaborating from some of the attendees.
The IA also responded pointing to a form to fill out for a request to give a talk at the IA.
Les filled out the form.
Les sent an email to the IA to make sure they had received the form and asking if anything else is required.
IA suggested September, given the China meeting, this was missed.
We agreed to put together a disk with a snapshot of the appropriate archive files containing analyzed data back to 1998 plus some documentation and then approach them about archiving the data, and a possible talk showing how the data can be used, e.g. comparison with economic indices, identifying on the network on events such as earthquake, societal unrest, cutting of cables etc. First part of the talk based on the presentation at Samsung. Depending on level of interest and support, we could . offer to update the data.
NUST (Updated 7/24/2019)
IPv6 host at NUST:
Wajahat has requested Hasan to install PingER on an IPv6 host at NUST, Saqib has contacted Hasan to tell him where to find and upload the code. There is not a host name for the MA yet. Hopefully, this will be available by next month's meeting.
7/24/2019 Les emailed Wajahat with a request for an update.
At the meeting Wajahat had asked the student to contact Saqib and get the information on energizing IPv6. Saqib provided the information, but the student could not access the URL (apparently the URLwas down). Wajahat was on leave and when he returned the internship had expired, so Wajahat is unsure what happened. Wajahat will start a new student next week and will set him on the IPv6 project.
Wajahat has a new intern. He is going through training for installing PingER. Wajahat hopes he will be ready to start real workin a coupke of weeks.
The recent move to revoke the special status of Jammu Kashmir may result in impacts on the Internet performance, so we are looking for PingER targets in JK.
UAF (University of Agriculture, Faisalabad)/GHZU (Updated 8/24/2019)
Saqib is undergoing his Mid Term Probationary Review at the University. 8/26/2019 Saqib says "It is in process."
Saqib plans to continue work on PingER monitoring for remote areas, in particular in Pakistan. He will use Android PingERs. This may partially tie into the Amity project.
He will also continue his work on Blockchain and plans to attend a Blockchain workshop in Guangzhou.
The 4th Call for Proposals for The Asi@Connect Project are now open. Saqib will submit a concept note in WP6 with Wajahat and Les as co-applicant.
8/25/2019: Emailed Saqib with a request for an update. Saqib replied hopefully in September.
Thailand, Charnsak 10/15/2019
MAs are down email sent to Charnsak 10/13/2019. Charnsak responded:
I checked with the administrator.
1. The pinger.cs.ubru.ac.th is gone. The raspberryPi is now dead. I will need to find a replacement.
2. They just move all the server to a new location I will check with them again.
Now I am doing a post-doc at University of Vienna also for the next 5 months.. So I can't physically access to the server this would be take sometime but I will find the way to fix it.
UNIMAS
MA is down, email sent asking for update 10/13/2019. No response by the time of this meeting.
SLAC (Updated 8/26/2019)
The talk on PingER at the Silicon Valley Samsung HQ 7/17/2019, went well, see link below. We can use this talk for the Internet Archive.
Les developed a tool to help in determining where targets are needed and some possibilities etc.
Also working with Umar to get the Motion metrics working again.
Iraq has had Internet problems dues to the disturbances see Iraq October 2019
Umar
Motion charts at https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/pinger-metrics-motion-chart.html was failing it no longer displayed the contents of the charts. Umar looked at the problem and suggested a solution. Les applied solution but did not fix in Chrome or Firefox. See PingER Metrics Motion Chart#October2019 for details. Les finally discovered and fixed a few problems with prm.pl, create-motion-charts-page.pl, create-motion-charts-pages.pl. It is now working again but requires enabling Flash. Discussed with Umar, i=t would be possible to make the web page not use Flash, but it could be non trivial. An alternative might be to use a similar tool called Explorer (see https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/explorer.html). The web is very valuable for identifying anomalous behavior which may require filtering the data.
Unfortunately he has not had any cycles to look into IPv6 vs IPv4 study. I suspect we should give up on this.
State of MAs.
Host
State
last seen
Status
pinger.uum.edu.my
Unable to gather data since 2nd May 2019. Host is pingable. Sent email 5/5/2019 to Adib, he will contact Dr. Suhaidi. Sent reminder 5/14/2019, Adib has contacted Dr Suhaidi who will get someone to help. Still down 6/2/2019, sent another reminder to Adib. Adib nudged Sohail. 6/19/2019 emailed Adib. 6/26/2019 Adib responded "Prof. Suhaidi has promised to follow up, but he was fully occupied / outstation early this month.Kindly give our friends some time ^_*". Sent reminder email 8/25/2019. Email 10/13/2019 to Adib and Sohail, will diaable if no update by end October 2019. Suhaidi responded "Hi Les, will address this and get back to you soon. ".
5/2/2019
pinger.unimas.my
Unable to gather data, does not ping. Email sent 5/24/2019. Johari responded that he will look at it. Sent reminder 6/2/2019 & 6/19/2019. Johari responded 6/19/2019: Issue started when UNIMAS started join domain policy which requires all PC connected to the LAN network to join the domain. Easily done for Windows based PC but we are having problem to configure the Linux server to do so. Still trying to find solution to this. Sent email to Johari 8/25/2019 asking for update. Email to Johari 10/13, will Disable end October if no news.
Stopped being pingable 2/25/2019. Thus by default, the gathering failed. Emailed Charnsak 3/4/2019, 3/15/2019. Down again 4/23/2019, restored 4/27/2019. Down again 6/6/2019. It is pingable. Sent email 7/5/2019. No response. Sent another email 7/24/2019 it was not pingable. Fixed 8/15/2019, then down again 8/24/2019, it is pingable from SLAC. Unable to ping from http://pinger6.cs.ubru.ac.th/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?function=ping&target=www.slac.stanford.edu&options=-i%200.2.Email 8/28/2019. Email 10/13/2019. Charnsak responded he plans to look at it
9/29/2019
.
pinger.cs.ubru.ac.th
Down starting 8/19/2019, unable to ping from SLAC. Email 8/28/2019. Email 10/13/2019, Charnsak responded he plans to look at it
8/19/2019
Next Meeting
Next meeting: There will be a Doodle poll, for November at 10 pm Pacific time; a day later 10:00 am Pakistan time; 10:30 am India time; 1:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time; 2:00 pm Thailand time; 7:00 am Jordan time. 6:00am Turkey time.
Old information
Exit plan for PingER moved here 10/10/2019
The general opinion at the July 2019 meeting was that we move to the Soft stop for PingER
Continue running monitors, gathering data, archiving and presenting as long as SLAC provides storage (1TB) andpinger.slac.stanford.eduVM
Give up on monitors after email prompt and no resolution
Do not add any extra functions
Keep historical data publicly available as long as SLAC provides storage (1TB) and pinger.slac.stanford.edu VM
Turkey (No update 7/23/2019), moved here 10/10/2019
Eyad emailed: "I have gathered some information about how to have a public IP address and it seems it is not complicated, just a subscription with the ISP, I will discuss in the next meeting". Sent email requesting update 5/26/2019. 5/27/2019 Eyad responded no progress yet. Another email sent 8/25/2019, Eyad responded 8/25/2019: "I am looking for a PhD position, In Turkey I tried my best to have a public IP but still have no results, I will keep trying and give you updates/"
We also received an unsolicited email: "We are employing PingER in Hasan Kalyoncu University, in Turkey, for the purpose of conducting researches on the Internet performance in Turkey."
We are unable to gather data since it is a private IP address(10.15.2.146). Sent email 7/3/2019 asking for update. Sent a repeat email 7/24/2019 suggesting testing if they have a public IP address and the web server is accessible. Sent another email explaining private vs public IP address 8/9/2019. No response. Will give up.
Jordan moved here
Baraa has just graduated from Princess Sumaya University with a Masters Degree (Major: Enterprise Systems Engineering) and is looking for Universities to continue his education (PhD.)
7/24/2019 Les sent email to Baraa aksing whether and how might Baraa's future affect the MA in Jordan.
7/24/2019 Baraa responded "I will have to check with my system's administrator regarding that, however I will do my best to keep the MA live.". However, Baraa responded 8/15/2019 "Since I will be leaving. The new system administrator turned it off." Les has disabled it.
UAF moved here 8/25/2019
The 4th Call for Proposals for The Asi@Connect Project are now open. Saqib will submit a concept note in WP6 with Wajahat and Les as co-applicants
From Les: WP6 mentions Pakistan, however, the examples are a bit of a stretch for PingER. Possibly deploying PingER MAs based on the Android in remote regions (NWFP, Gilgit, Balochistan, etc.) The difficulty will be getting collaborators in the remote regions, also probably a lot of travel to shake hands, give encouragement, assist, troubleshoot, etc. A challenge will be convincing the collaborators that they are getting something useful out of this. Maybe need to extend PingER to add some easy to use tools. Another possibility is reviving the PingER MAs in Pakistan. Again, as Wajahat indicates, it is finding collaborators willing to install and manage the MAs. Some development may be needed to make the installation easier and maybe add remote management. Again an issue may be what do the collaborators stand to gain, and the longer-term continuation of the collaboration as people move on.
WP4 talks about PerfSONAR which is monitoring. Providing training on PingER, the reverse traceroute servers might have some traction.
For both of these if one could install a mesh of MAs in Pakistan, including the reverse traceroute/ping servers (which are trivial to install on a web server, take minimal maintenance, and are much simpler than an MA) then one could address the problem of locating the lat/long of routers by trilateration of ping response time. Note though getting the lat longs of end hosts is fairly well addressed, routers are usually identified as being located to the owner (e.g. all ESnet's routers on the US and Europe are defined as being located at Berkeley California (the HQ of ESnet)
Turkey moved here 8/9/2019
We also received an unsolicited email:
"We are employing PingER in Hasan Kalyoncu University, in Turkey, for the purpose of conducting researches on the Internet performance in Turkey.
Actually, we have collected data in our node, so we would like our collected data to be retrieved by the archival site at SLAC. Below are the details information on our monitoring node.
DNS: pinger.hku
Public IP: 10.15.2.146
Node Coordinates
Latitude: 37.014764 Longitude: 37.205743
Node Location: Şahinbey Mahallesi, Havalimanı Yolu 8.Km, 27000 Şahinbey/Gaziantep
Contact Person:
Name: Mohammed Madi
Designation: Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering Department
Thank you in advance, looking forward to hearing from you"
Unfortunately, this appears to be a private IP address so is not accessible. Les sent an email 4/19/2019 to Mohammed. Mohammed provided a public IP address (95.0.84.5), however, it is not pingable and the URL does not respond. Sent another email 4/24/2019, 4/28/2019, 5/7/2019, 5/26/2019.
Also sent email to Adib (who is in Turkey) and Eyad in case they know the person or site. Adib responded 4/20/2019: "Yes, I know Mohammed, he graduated from UUM (Malaysia), and we worked together at the same department. He is a good researcher. I think, he can contribute to PingER project."
Mohammed responded 5/28/2019: "Dear Les I am working on it. but currently I am busy with final examinations and project presentations, submitting the results. I will be free next week and will fully concentrate on that issue and settle it. thank you so much for your concern and I am sorry for being late in response."
Sent email 7/3/2019 asking for update. Sent a repeat email 7/24/2019 suggesting testing if they have a public IP address and the web server is accessible. Sent another request for update 8/9/2019.
The information has been passed to Topher, who plans to install on an Android. The ball is now in our court
There is a discussion between Les and Aayush on how to format the raw data records, in particular with respect to the lat/long. Sent a reminder 4/18/2019.
We (SLAC) an email to Aayush asking how we gather the raw data from the cloud. Sent reminder 4/18/2019.
Aayish responded 4/18/2019:
Yes, we have modified the app to write the semi-colon to the file as a separator.
However, at this point we suggest you to not make any changes to the pinger project yet.
Let us see and run in this parallel to what is already setup at Amity MA. This will allow us to compare the quality of results by both the systems – one at present which does not utilize the app, and the new one which requires an app for data collection.
We send the data from the app to the firebase cloud service as JSON objects via a REST API. On the cloud-server side, we intend to build a compute-service that automatically converts the json data to a txt format, for consumption by data researcher team at amity (because they are already used to running analysis on the txt files; but seem to be open to working with JSON data as well). [For the SLAC gatherer we would at least initially prefer the data to be retrieved/available in txt form. This way the changes to the gatherer are minimized and more consistent with current practice.]
So once the team finds that the results are significant enough, then we can formally propose to include lat/long data in the Pinger gathering, archiving and analysis. For now, it would be best that we do not disturb the current Amity MA, and that the android project runs parallel to this."
Topher is back, Bebo is contacting him. Bebo's thoughts were that:PingER will need a fixed name for each Android MA. Since the Android may be mobile the IP address may be dynamic. There is a DNS name to dynamic IP address service that may be useful. Maybe there is another unique fixed identifier in an Android that could be used such as a serial number or SIM ID.
If the Amity app is robust (i.e. it does not noticeably impact the other services, power, networking, security etc) make it part of the standard Rainforest installation;
Topher's package knows the GPS location, so it should be available to PingER for recording.
NUST moved here 7/24/2019
Wajahat suggested a letter to the higher-ups at NUST about PingER would assist. Les worked with Wajahat to craft such a letter. It was sent to Wajahat by email 4/3/2019. It was sent by paper mail 4/4/2019 to Principal SEECS.
Wajahat said the letter has been received and a written response is being drafted. Is there an update?
They (NUST) would also be interested in other collaborations with SLAC
Since Les is no longer an employee of SLAC but rather an emeritus this may complicate things.
A possibility might be in high-speed data transfer. It would need a champion from NUST, and a plan and funding to provide access to 100Gbps
Wajahat said that contacts at some sites are not very interested in PingER and wonder why there are so many pings. Thus he believes we need new sites representing the regions of Pakistan that have willing collaborators. Thus we should give up on sites such as CAE and ISRA that have not had any data to gather for a year or so. Les has since disabled these sites.
